Tingler fails his first Snell test
Padres manager Jayce Tingler angered his former Cy Young-winner on the way to a weird loss in Pittsburgh.
Okay, here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to pretend like the Padres should have easily swept the series in Pittsburgh against the Pirates, and I’m not going to overreact to the team losing by a score of 8-4 on Tuesday.
I always say that I don’t predict sweeps because things like this always happen in baseball. And, while the Pirates seemed hapless in the first game against the Padres, Pittsburgh won their two previous games against the Cubs by a combined score of 15-3. I’m not saying this was predictable, but it was in the range of possibilities.
What I do want to do is dig just a little bit deeper into two factors that lead to the loss, because they both have elements of concern to them.
Taking out Snell
Blake Snell was not sharp yesterday. Here’s how his outing went, in the simplest terms:
Groundout
Strikeout
Single
Walk
Passed Ball
Double
Double
Walk
Hit By Pitch
Yup, that’s bad. Looks like Snell lost his control and couldn’t find the strike zone. A look at his location says that he was having a hard time throwing anything but his fastball for strikes:
Snell usually throws his fastball about half of the time, which means it was probably going to be a tough, grind-it-out, gritty veteran performance from Snell. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but he’d get through 5 innings and give his team a chance to win….right?
Nope. Out came Jayce Tingler with the hook after the HBP, the first time in two years that Snell had been pulled in the 1st inning, to bring in Craig Stammen.
In the next inning, former starting pitcher Nabil Crismatt would be brought in and asked to eat innings. He would throw 85 pitches over 5 innings, giving up 3 ER in the process, in a performance that could probably best be described as dangerous to his health.
So, why trust Crismatt to eat innings and pitch out of trouble, and not Snell? I have no idea. Here’s what Tingler said about it in the post-game:
I can’t stress this enough: Jayce Tingler needs to stop over-managing, especially when it comes to Blake Snell. A very large reason why Snell was available in an offseason is because Tampa Bay Rays manager Kevin Cash would pull him from games too early, and Snell wanted a chance to prove that he doesn’t need to be babied.
The decision to remove him, and the postgame justification that “He couldn’t find it and he couldn’t get it in the strike zone,” is the type of thing that is usually reserved for rookies. Not a 6th-year pitcher with a Cy Young Award on the shelf at home.
Even if Snell was going to get beat up by the Pirates, I don’t see the difference between that and letting Crismatt get beat up while throwing significantly more pitches than his body was ready for. Snell would’ve been happier to take some lumps to know that his manager trusts him.
If anything, this was an easy test to see if Tingler would let Snell pitch his way out of trouble, the exact thing that Snell has been publicly clamoring for, and Tingler let him down. While Darvish gets a personal catcher and Musgrove gets a mural on his high school, so far Snell has been dealt a rookie catcher and yet another manager who thinks he needs a short leash.
Men on base
The difference in score in this game can be found in one very simple stat: Hitting with runners in scoring position.
SDP: 1-13 (.077)
PIT: 7-15 (.467)
It’s much harder to score runs if you can’t get hits when runners are in scoring position.
In total, the Padres left FIFTEEN men on base yesterday. So far this season, San Diego is averaging 8.25 men left on base per game, trailing only the Mets (who can’t seem to score) and the Dodgers (who always have men on base, so they both score a ton and leave a ton on).
Right now, the Padres fall somewhere between those two teams. They’re getting on a lot, and usually scoring a bunch of runs while leaving men on, but yesterday was an example of how that doesn’t always work out the way you want.
Quick hits
Wil Myers left the game with an injury that was later described as knee inflammation. Without Tatis in the lineup, the team really needs Myers to knock in some of the aforementioned baserunners, but he’ll likely miss time over the next week or two while dealing with the knee.
Tommy Pham is going to be fine, but right now he’s having some of the worst luck I’ve ever seen. If you ignore the results and focus on the process….
These are great numbers! Pham is completely in control, only swinging at strikes and barreling most of them. That should lead to him having a stellar offensive start to the season, but instead his slash line is .128/.286/.128.
The raw stats tell you that he’s a singles hitter who is struggling to make contact. I even saw some Padres fans comparing him to Austin Hedges after he went 0-2 (2 BB) in yesterday’s game. The truth is simpler but more difficult to understand: Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Pham has been good, his luck hasn’t yet caught up.
Pham’s .147 BABIP is an extreme outlier in his career. His average BABIP is closer to .300, and there’s literally zero reason why it shouldn’t get up there again some time soon.